Catches win matches?

We all heard about how India’s dismal fielding let them down in the recently concluded test series. But when checked ball by ball (literally!), it surprisingly turned out that England has displayed far worse performance in fielding. Let’s dive into the details that I got after churning the commentary of all the test matches in the series.

England dropped 13 catches throughout the tournament while India dropped only 9 catches.

Stuart Broad was the most unlucky bowler with 7 dropped catches on his bowling.

Matt Prior dropped the most number of catches (4) in the first 2 test matches and this resulted in a 112 runs loss (highest loss by any player in the series) for the team had he taken all the chances.

Though all the above insights indicate England fielding to be in the red but the following insights might make it clear why India’s dismal fielding impacted them more.

India suffered 279 runs from the dropped chances while England suffered only 237.

MS Dhoni dropped a couple of catches which resulted in 85 runs (highest for India)

Jadeja who is considered to be one of the best fielders in the team dropped Cook on 15 runs, eventually continued to get his highest score (95) of the series and return in form.

Jos Butler who was dropped twice, made most of his chances by scoring 97 runs more.

Ian Bell dropped 2 catches but was too lucky as only 7 runs were scored by the batsman before getting out.

At the beginning of the series, both the captains were under the scanner. MS Dhoni’s poor overseas record as a captain and Alastair Cook’s disastrous performances as a batsman. Both teams made it a point to give them a chance to recover from their respective batting forms.

Both Cook and Dhoni were dropped 3 times in the entire series. (Most for any batsman in the series)

The following table contains the details of the catches dropped in the series. Do let me know if you know of any dropped catch which is not included in the list.